Titian vs. Roadrunner

If you are made for flight, intended for it, you had better find a pursuer, fast. Otherwise all that fleeing is going nowhere. This bull, he’s got a bad intent, he wants to hog the entire corner of the picture. The girl is looking tasty to the espying putti. This small bird crisscrossing my childhood at enormous speed, outrunning everything, running out of road to run down, running out of canyon, running out of cartoon runs out of the cartoon, never to return. That’s why this landscape looks forlorn. The world turned upside down and shaken like a piggybank, the one last coin rattling around inside, just coughed it up.

Dan Chiasson has been contributing poems to the magazine since 2000 and reviews since 2007. He teaches at Wellesley College.